Trustees Dropped the Ball on Assessor Decision
Get the same service at 1/3 the price! I’m sure we have all heard similar claims and disregarded them because we all know if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t true. Recently, the Village of Germantown Trustees voted to hire a new assessor at the price of $29,500 per year. Accurate Appraisals claims that they can do the same job for less than 1/3 of the price the Village paid the assessor last year. This amount comes to only $3.51 per parcel and the current assessor, Grota Appraisals, estimated they spent 2000 hours a year assessing Germantown. If Accurate Appraisals were to spend the same amount of time they would be earning less than $15.00 per hour. Is that all they think they are worth OR isn’t it more likely that they will only spend 1/3 of the time.
Let’s see what accepting the bid of $29,500 will NOT get Germantown residents:
• You no long have a LOCAL assessor. Accurate Appraisals’ office is located in Menasha (Grota Appraisals is located in Menomonee Falls).
• You no longer have an assessor that knows the workings of Germantown first hand. Accurate Appraisals has no staff members that live in Germantown (1/4 of Grota Appraisals staff live in Germantown).
• You no longer have an assessor who is familiar with Washington County. Accurate Appraisals has zero accounts in Washington County (Grota Appraisals assesses 13 other communities in Washington County).
• You no longer have an assessor firm with close to 40 years of experience. Accurate has been in business less than 10 years.
• You no longer have an assessor who got positive reviews from both the Department of Revenue and Waukesha County.
• You no longer have an assessor who provides the Village Hall and Police Department with 17 copies of the assessment software at no charge. Accurate Appraisals will provide zero copies. (Grota Appraisals provided these and updated the databases bi-monthly)
• You no longer have an assessor who will view and list Personal Property accounts. Per Accurate’s proposal, the Village of Germantown must provide them a list of businesses rather than performing the duty of collecting data themselves.
• You no longer have the assessor that was the first choice of the Village Hall employees who are the people who work with the assessor on a daily basis. Grota Appraisals was their choice because they knew the integrity, hard work and services that were provided.
Three years ago when Grota Appraisals took over as Germantown’s assessor, they uncovered 4.5 million in omitted value and assessment errors. They added 4.1 million to the Personal Property roll that had been omitted. A low priced assessor, that the Village chose in order to save money, caused these errors. Now they have made the same mistake again!
The trustees made this vote at the November 2nd Village Board meeting without one word of discussion. Obviously the Trustees had already made their decision outside of the Boardroom and didn’t want the discussion to be made on public record. I no longer have any “trust” in my trustees to make prudent decisions.
Patricia Rollinger
